Clio Visualizing History, http

The small Web site Clio Visualizing History (CVH) suggests an informal gathering of like-minded friends, where users see familiar faces and meet interesting new people. Any well-planned buffet reflects the tastes of the organizer, in this case the public historian Lola Van Wagenen, long concerned with women's issues and visual media. In 1996 she cofounded Clio Inc., Visualizing History, one of many start-up companies promoting education projects that integrate new media for the nonacademic public. After serving as an executive producer for the 2002 documentary Miss America (featured by pbs on American Experience), Van Wagenen shifted her company to a nonprofit organization, based in Shelburne, Vermont. She maintains CVH with the aid of an administrator and a graduate assistant named Jennifer Reeder. Additional help comes from a local Web design firm, Ecopixel, and a panel of a dozen advisers from the humanities. CVH has a stake in half a dozen documentaries—in various stages of development—that center on lively topics in American women's history, and the site serves as a placeholder for this series of educational films in progress. But CVH is primarily a modest online salon with several attractive rooms that continue to evolve. The first, headed “Visualizing America,” contains two well-illustrated case studies. One is Reeder's excellent essay on “Quilts as Visual History,” complete with a bibliography and annotated links to quilt-related Web sites. The other is an elaborate presentation by the American studies scholar Gregory M. Pfitzer, built around two popular nineteenth-century survey texts on U.S. history. Pfitzer's exhibit, using more than sixty images, summarizes the argument of his 2002 book, Picturing the Past: Illustrated Histories and the American Imagination, 1840–1900

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